


Talking About Memories: How Blade Runner 2049 Succeeds as a Sequel

by primeideal



Category: Blade Runner (Movies)
Genre: Format: Meta, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:13:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25184608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/primeideal/pseuds/primeideal
Summary: Analysis of parallels between "Blade Runner" and "Blade Runner 2049," as well as how their narratives overlap.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7
Collections: Unconventional Fanwork Exchange 2020





	Talking About Memories: How Blade Runner 2049 Succeeds as a Sequel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bold_seer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bold_seer/gifts).



> Not all of this is very groundbreaking, but I hope there's something you find thought-provoking or a new perspective!
> 
> Content note: canonical character death and sexual consent issues. (Also spoilers, obviously.)

A recent aerial video displays Los Angeles on the Fourth of July, 2020, with many residents lighting fireworks at night. The internet’s response was essentially “all this needs is the soundtrack and we’d have the opening scene of Blade Runner.” Eight months after the fictionalized timeframe of the first movie, _Blade Runner_ still has a pull on the imagination; its sequel, _Blade Runner 2049_ was less successful but still acclaimed. In an era of remakes and reboots, 2049 distinguishes itself by acknowledging and affirming its predecessor’s narrative, while at the same time, its callbacks and parallels reference the richness of the original.

**2049 as Sequel**

The main conflict of the first Blade Runner is the manhunt between Rick Deckard, the titular officer, and the four replicants comprising Roy Batty’s gang. This is conclusively resolved with the deaths of all four, and unsurprisingly, they are still dead thirty years later. Although Roy’s “Tears in Rain” musical theme makes an important reprise, the Nexus-6 gang don’t reappear.

But we also see the clash between the replicants and the Tyrell Corporation proper, as well as Deckard’s growing connection with Rachael and their escape. The various releases/cuts of the movie suggest another question; is Deckard himself a human or an unaware replicant?

When Roy kills Tyrell (and Sebastian), the Tyrell Corporation loses a great deal of influence. However, they do not disappear completely; the Nexus-8s like Sapper Morton and Freysa go into production shortly after. (Both Sapper and Freysa are around by 2021.) The title text for 2049 quickly informs us that replicants were outlawed, Tyrell Corporation went bankrupt, and then Niander Wallace bought it out and started a new line of replicants. This is a lot of change to handle in an opening infodump; what did Tyrell’s death matter, in the grand scheme of things, if another creepy entrepreneur with a penchant for Biblical allusions is going to be in charge anyway?

However, Wallace has schemes that were not part of Tyrell’s main plan. He is interested in replicant reproduction as well as robots like Joi, whereas Tyrell experimented with unaware replicants like Rachael. We also get a sense of why Wallace’s protein farms were world-changing; catastrophic climate change means the Sepúlveda Pass is now the Sepúlveda Sea Wall, and it snows in Los Angeles (in July). K projects a hamburger onto his meal instead of having access to real meat. In this context, having this technologist regain access to replicants isn’t totally unearned.

The various cuts of the original differ in their implications for the finale. In the Theatrical Edition, we see Deckard and Rachael escape into a verdant world very different from the noir city, and Deckard’s voiceover says that Rachael did not have the four-year lifespan of the Nexus-6s. In others, the movie ends with them entering the elevator, and the echo of Gaff’s “It’s too bad she won’t live, but then, who does?”

In 2049, we see that Deckard is alive thirty years after these events, albeit having spent much of the interim secluded in Las Vegas. Rachael, however, died in childbirth. One valid criticism is that this plotline sidelines an important character and reduces her to an offscreen trope. Another is that, if she and Deckard really could have had decades together, this somewhat undermines the “success” of the original.

However, Deckard explains that he had already left Rachael before giving birth, because a replicant child would be hunted down by the authorities. Even without Rachael’s death, it’s likely they would not have reunited; this was part of a complicated plan, with Freysa and Sapper’s help. Because the child survives (and defies Deckard’s expectations by reuniting with him), we can infer that Deckard and Rachael’s hopes did too—albeit the change in their plans happened offscreen, probably shortly after they realized that Rachael was unique. Gaff also seems to have kept Rachael secret from his LAPD colleagues, so that part of the escape is respected as well.

Later cuts also add Deckard’s dream sequence with a unicorn, suggesting that this is an implanted memory (and he’s therefore a replicant) because Gaff just happens to leave a unicorn behind as his parting acknowledgement of Rachael. 2049 does not answer the question of Deckard’s identity. The movie plays with it, though, through Gaff’s scene (“he retired” has multiple meanings in this setting) and Wallace’s villain monologue (was Deckard a replicant designed to be able to procreate with Rachael? Maybe, maybe not). In leaving this open-ended, it recognizes the spirited disagreement over the different cuts.

**2049 as Echo**

Many of the general motifs—the importance of memory, eyes as “windows to the soul,” precipitation—appear in both films. But there are also more specific parallels connecting the two movies.

When we’re first introduced to Deckard in the original, he’s eating sushi and is interrupted by two colleagues who speak to him in “Cityspeak,” a creole combining Hungarian, Japanese, and other languages of the futuristic, cosmopolitan Los Angeles. K’s matching scene comes later in 2049, at a market that sells soju and ramen from fancy vending machines. The agents who approach him are not LAPD, but rather part of Freysa’s replicant underground. One of them addresses him in Finnish, marking him as a Blade Runner. This does not dissuade Mariette from making conversation, though. Unlike Deckard’s sushi vendor, who seemed awed or afraid at the Blade Runner title, Mariette attempts to flirt with K even knowing he’s dangerous.

In the original, the Voight-Kampff test is a series of questions humans give to try to identify illegal replicants. In a world where animal life is scarce, many of the questions attempt to test for empathy by asking subjects how they would react to animals (tortoises, wasps, butterflies). In 2049, where new replicants are tolerated on Earth, K is instead given the baseline test. Although the questions thrown at him are emotional and open-ended (“What is it like to hold the hand of someone you love?”), he is supposed to ignore the provocation and instead respond with key words from Nabokov’s _Pale Fire._ Rather than trying to blend in, replicants are expected to behave predictably. K does, however, face a “real-life” version of one of the Voight-Kampff scenarios; a wasp (or other bee) lands on his hand when he arrives in irradiated Las Vegas. Even without humans, life continues to evolve and survive.

As police officers, Deckard and K can threaten unhelpful business owners with financial investigation. When Deckard is looking for Zhora, he asks restaurant owner Taffy Lewis about his licenses. When K shows his badge to the orphanage director, the latter assumes he’s there to investigate fraud—“bigger than you have tried to shut me down.”

Photography and images play an important role in supplementing memory. In the original, Rachael protests that she can’t be a replicant, because she has memories of her childhood and photographs of her with her mother. These turn out to be irrelevant; the memories are implants from Tyrell’s niece, and maybe the pictures are too. In 2049, K comes across a photograph of Freysa holding Rachael’s newborn child, but his assumptions are inaccurate. Even though he has the implanted memory of the 6-10-21 horse, the baby in the photo isn’t really him.

Deckard infamously “enhances” a blurry photograph of Leon’s to find Zhora’s snake scale. There are several similar montages in 2049: K scans the Las Vegas ruins with his heat map to decect the bees, but he also scans Rachael’s bones to find the incisions and her replicant number. (He seems to be more perceptive with the forensic machines than the technicians!) But while K is hunting, he is also _being_ hunted by Luv, who wants to find the child for Wallace. When she remotely shoots down the scavengers in San Diego, her zooming/panning technology is similar.

Both Tyrell and Wallace speak in religious allusions (“the prodigal son,” “storm Eden and retake her.”) Wallace’s quotation from Genesis (“the Lord remembered Rachel and opened her womb”) gives new context to Rachael the replicant; the Biblical Rachel had a son named Joseph, but died during the birth of her second child. Tyrell and Wallace also both rely on human scientists whose health issues cause them to remain earthbound rather than travel to the off-world colonies. J. F. Sebastian is twenty-five, but prematurely aged due to “Methuselah syndrome”; Ana Stelline is twenty-eight during the events of 2049, and was originally labeled with “Galatians syndrome” (more Biblical references). Sebastian, a genetic designer, creates bizarre “toys” to keep himself company; Ana lives in a bubble, and has to create artificial memories to sustain herself and the replicants. Given that Sebastian meets a brutal end off-screen, viewers of 2049 might expect Ana not to reappear after the scene at her office. The parallels diverge here, though, with 2049’s twist bringing her back into the spotlight.

An important criticism of the original is the sex scene between Deckard and Rachael. Is he pressuring her into something she doesn’t consent to, or affirming her personhood when she’s shaken about her identity? The sex scene in 2049 features K, Mariette, and Joi’s hologram blending with Mariette—Joi solicits Mariette because she suspects K is attracted to her, but dismisses her coldly the next morning. While all of them appear to be consenting fully, interpretations differ as to how fully a “person” Joi is.

K’s Joi certainly has an advanced system of goals and desires. She is the one who proposes that she come with him in the emanator when he runs away, so she can’t be used to locate him. So she’s not just a tool of the Wallace Corporation, who are hoping to track him down. However, the advertisements declare that each Joi model is “everything you want to see” and hear. Even the large holograms have the “what a day” behavior, and tell K that he looks “like a good Joe.” Because he told his Joi the story about the horse so often, she responds by recognizing that what _he_ wants is to be perceived as special and unique, and flatters him with dreams of being something more than a replicant. I come down on the side that Joi is not a real, fully-independent “person” in the way both replicants and humans are, but interpretations vary. In either case, the brutal way Luv kills K’s Joi to torture him foreshadows how she will gun down replacement-Rachael in front of Deckard.

Both Joshi and Freysa view the existence of a replicant child as a potentially world-changing event—Joshi with fear, Freysa with hope. If true humanity is defined by the capacity to reproduce, however, does that mean the antagonists of the original were not fully people? Ultimately, K chooses not to aid the resistance, instead drawing inspiration from Freysa’s other message; “dying for the right cause is the most human thing we can do.” While bleak, this connects both K’s choice to reunite Deckard and Ana with Roy Batty’s choice to save Deckard’s life even when his own death was inevitable. Whether they kill or save, choosing to define their own goals is what makes both movies’ characters well-rounded people.


End file.
